


time in a bottle

by callunavulgari



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Closure, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 21:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6488212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If I didn’t exist,” Thawne says, quietly, moving to slide his fingers up Barry’s jaw; they leave goosebumps in their wake. “Then neither would you. And if you didn’t exist… well. We won’t get into that mess. So the universe — the, hah, <i>Speed Force</i> — sent me here. A paradox, clinging to the cracks between time. Just… waiting.”</p><p>His thumb strokes there hesitantly, palm warm and weathered against Barry’s jaw. He wishes it weren’t so familiar. Wishes it wasn’t still so wanted. Barry swallows and watches Thawne’s eyes track the movement. He still hasn’t pulled away. Why hasn’t he pulled away? “W—” Barry coughs when his voice creaks alarmingly, and clears his throat. “Waiting for what?”</p><p>Thawne chuckles, his thumb brushing over the curve of Barry’s lip. He slides it across them, slow and measured, and when Barry gasps, dips the very tip inside. Just enough to wet it. And then he says, blue eyes heavy with intent, “For you, of course."</p>
            </blockquote>





	time in a bottle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SpaceOperetta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceOperetta/gifts).



> Once upon a time, just after I'd written God Complex, spaceoperetta messaged me on tumblr. We got to talking about the Flash and comic vs. show stuff and at some point, she said this to me: "and I also like the mental image of Barry and Thawne just sitting together on a skyscraper in a ruined world talking (because Barry said he forgives him) and w hat else are you going to do besides try to get out." Which sparked something in my brain, and I turned and said, hey, mind if I write this? And I believe her response was DO IIIIT. So. Have a fic where Eobard Thawne was shunted outside of time because he needed to exist but also couldn't and Barry stumbles into his little corner of the world.
> 
> I wasn't trying to make this as Inception as possible, but the main thing that sparked this idea was them sitting on skyscrapers suspended in mid-air, so I just kind of went with it.
> 
> ETA: CHANGED THE TITLE BECAUSE SPACEOPERETTA CAME ALONG AND TOSSED ANOTHER AWESOME IDEA MY WAY. Srsly I can't stop laughing.

The Speed Force is still clinging to the backs of Barry’s knuckles when he stumbles out of the portal, feet tripping over themselves as he grinds to a halt. Sparks of yellow chase after him, making the flattened hairs on the backs of his hands threaten to stand on end.

Barry curses quietly, shaking his hands to rid himself of the sensation, and glances up just in time to meet a pair of eyes that he thought he’d left behind two universes ago. Eobard Thawne meets his eyes and, his face melting into a softness that Barry hasn’t seen since Thawne was firmly Harrison Wells in his mind, says, “Hello, Barry.”

Barry blinks. Once, twice, three times. Just to make sense of what he’s seeing.

Maybe Kara threw him too far, he thinks. Maybe there is no fast track back to your universe once you’ve skipped straight into an alternate reality. Barry’s a flat stone that’s been chucked too hard across a peaceful lake, skip skip skipping, until he skips straight onto the next body of water.

Thawne is still smiling at him. He’s almost exactly as Barry remembers him, right down to wearing Wells’ body like an ill-fitting coat. Right down to the yellow suit, only now, he’s practically radiating warmth and affection.

It’s making Barry uncomfortable.

“Thawne?” Barry whispers, taking a step forward. When his foot touches down, he blinks, tearing his eyes away from Thawne and letting them refocus on his surroundings. His eyes go wide.

“Ah yes,” Thawne says happily. “That.”

“That?” Barry breathes, torn between horror and awe. He shoots an incredulous glance in Thawne’s direction. He’s closer than before, tiptoeing up to Barry’s side without him even noticing, until he’s more than close enough to touch.

It should concern him.

It doesn’t.

Thawne is safe. Barry knows exactly where he stands with Thawne — knows exactly what he can expect from him. Thawne is the devil he knows, not… whatever _that_ is.

The world seems to tilt and Barry tilts with it, his vision going bright as an intense bout of nausea sends him reeling. For a moment, he can only see in shades of red. Doubled over and gasping, he makes a grab for Thawne’s arm. “What is that? Where are we?”

Thawne steps into Barry’s space, and that does set off alarm bells, but he’s just propping Barry up against his side, an arm darting out to wrap around his waist, easy as you please. As if his rivalry with Barry hadn’t lead to his being written from existence. As if he hadn’t been trying to kill Barry the last time he’d seen him. Which — that — yes, he’ll get to that. Soon. Once he can catch his breath again.

“That, Barry Allen,” Thawne breathes, his breath hot and damp against Barry’s ear. “Is what time looks like from the outside.”

Barry had thought that despite everything, despite time travel and wormholes and evil clones of his friends trying to kill him, Kara’s space ship would be the weirdest thing that he’d ever see. His life is weird, growing weirder every day, but spaceships kind of took the cake.

Barry was wrong. This is the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.

Skyscrapers hang from mid-air, like great, jagged stalactites, bigger than anything he’s ever seen. They’re just _there_ , swaying in the breeze, anchored to nothing; a dozen burnt out shells, their bombed out windows gaping like the saw-toothed maw of a great beast. As Barry watches, slack-jawed, one breaks away from the group to orbit a copse of purple-leafed trees, completely independent from the others.

On the horizon, near and far all at once, sits a tree so large that its gold and silver-leafed branches nearly blot out the sun. Only the faintest rays of light makes it to where they are, leaving their side of the world an orange-tinted, perpetual realm of twilight. Beneath the tree stretches a maze of roots, down down down, so far beneath them that they're obscured by foggy green clouds before they can come to an end. The root system, impossibly, is even bigger than the canopy.

Nothing makes sense.

There is no _ground_. Nothing solid beneath Barry’s feet. He’s ankle deep in a pool of water and the only thing that he can see is his own reflection. He hangs, suspended mid-air, his body telling him that gravity is still functional, but his eyes telling him otherwise. It’s like his feet aren’t even _there_. They've been cut off smoothly, just where they meet the surface of the water, severed at the joints. Experimentally- dizzily, he lifts a foot. And there it is, whole and unharmed. Gone invisible beneath impossibly opaque liquid, gleaming like an oil slick.

And there, back in the direction he’d come from, is the greatest wonder of them all.

He can’t make sense of it. The longer he stares, the more it changes. One moment it looks like a spider-webbed nebula, bright and bloated with glittering stars. And then it will look like an enormous being, so large that concepts like size and  _mass_  lose all meaning. It has a huge, mean slash of a mouth that could easily swallow even the largest of stars, but no true face. Looking at it makes Barry's head ache, distant pulse that throbs in time with his heartbeat.

Another blip in time and it's a river; gentle and fierce all at once.

Barry keeps staring at it, wide-eyed with wonder, until Thawne lifts a hand to cover his eyes. Barry flinches; the hand is callused in all the right places, rough and smooth in equal turns. He smells like leather and salt. Familiar. So familiar. And yet, the most impossible thing yet in this world of impossibilities is that the touch remains gentle. It offers protection- _safety_ , rather than everything Barry's come to expect from Thawne. Already, the ache in his head is abating.

“Look away, Barry,” Thawne urges, his voice sending a hot shiver down Barry’s spine.

Barry swallows, and when Thawne removes his hand, keeps his eyes on Thawne and Thawne alone. He steadies his face, tries to make himself go cold when all he feels is wonder, and asks, “What is this place?”

Thawne’s lips quirk up into a smirk and he gestures around them, at the gravity-defying skyscrapers and the mirror-like puddles of water that form a stepping stone path through empty space.

“That,” he proclaims, indicating the space behind Barry. “Is where you came from. Time. Reality. The universe as we — or rather — as you know it.”

Barry licks his dry lips, the world steadying the longer he looks at Thawne. He clears his throat. “And this?”

“This,” Thawne says with a laugh, making that all-encompassing gesture again. “Is the outside. Outside of time. Outside reality. It’s that crack between worlds.” The smile creeps wider. “Limbo, if you will.”

“Cisco should have never introduced you to Inception,” Barry says without thinking, glancing over his shoulder at the… thing. Time vortex. Time stream? Whatever. It’s in the shape of a pod of whales, all gleaming, their silhouettes as indistinct as the lining of a cloud. He watches them play, the little ones falling apart and reforming again a moment later, just out of sight. The purpose of the game seems to be to startle, to surprise, and Barry smiles at them, his head going fuzzy. It's like a game of tag. He was always good at tag. He could play with them, he thinks. He can't do what they do, but he can run. He could run circles around them. They'd never catch him.

He takes a fortifying breath, and is immediately being jerked back.

Thawne is watching him with shrewd eyes, a hand wrapped firmly around Barry’s arm. “And where exactly do you think you’re going?”

Barry blinks. He wasn’t going anywhere, he almost says, but even as he thinks it, his mind takes note of the changes. His body is turned ever so slightly away from Thawne’s. They’re both several paces closer to the glowing pod of whale clouds than they were a moment ago. One foot is perilously close to the edge of this particular puddle, the other dangling out over empty space. He has no clue what will happen if he steps out of the water. Will he float like the skyscrapers? Like the trees, with their grasping, endless roots? Or will he plummet, free-falling for all eternity?

Slowly, Barry lowers it back to safety. “I… don’t know.”

Thawne scoffs and begins to walk backwards, tugging Barry along with him. “As long as you’re here, it will call to you. The universe is fickle. It likes everything to be perfectly in order.” He smiles wide, showing teeth and whispers in his ear, as if bestowing upon him a secret: “You’re on the wrong side of time and it knows it.”

“Can’t I just… run back into it?”

The smile falls away and Thawne fixes him with a look, lips pursed in disapproval. His voice, when he speaks again, is almost hostile. Much more like the Thawne he knew. Now if only the world around them would take a hint and right itself as well.

“If it was that easy,” Thawne says, squeezing Barry’s fingers. “Do you really think that I’d still be here?”

Barry opens his mouth. Closes it. Then changes tack. “Why _are_ you here? I saw you die. We all saw you die.”

Thawne raises an eyebrow. With another indecipherably gentle look, he lets go of Barry, the pads of his fingers sliding smoothly over Barry's wrist and forearm until he's out of reach. The touch is slow and lingering, as if reluctant to let him go. Even then he leaves his arm outstretched towards him, ready to reach out and catch him up again if needed. Only once he’s seemingly satisfied that Barry won’t take a flying leap off their little pond does he cross his arms across his chest. “You saw me _disappear_ ,” he tells Barry steadily. “Ever wonder why your timeline stayed intact? I was erased, Barry. And yet, your mother still died. You _remembered_ me.”

“The singularity—”

“Hardly a setback,” Thawne says with a sneer. He edges closer, a familiar twist to his mouth. Closer to the savage delight that Barry remembers than whatever all this has been. When he leans in, his breath ghosts across Barry’s lips. “No, see, I _created_ your timeline. It _needs_ me to exist." 

Thawne lets out a sharp, manic burst of laughter, reaching in to clasp a hand around the nape of Barry’s neck. The touch is uncomfortable, unexpected, drawing him closer as Barry attempts to squirm away. Thawne’s laugh eases back into a chuckle, his grip firm. With his other hand he reaches up, gently easing the cowl back until Barry can feel the wind on his face.

“If I didn’t exist,” Thawne says, quietly, moving to slide his fingers up Barry’s jaw; they leave goosebumps in their wake. “Then neither would you. And if you didn’t exist… well. We won’t get into that mess. So the universe — the, hah, S _peed Force_ — sent me here. A paradox, clinging to the cracks between time. Just… waiting.”

His thumb strokes there hesitantly, palm warm and weathered against Barry’s jaw.

He wishes it weren’t so familiar. Wishes it wasn’t still so wanted.

Barry swallows and watches Thawne’s eyes track the movement. He still hasn’t pulled away. Why hasn’t he pulled away?

“W—” Barry coughs when his voice creaks alarmingly, and clears his throat. “Waiting for what?”

Thawne chuckles, his thumb brushing over the curve of Barry’s lip. He slides it across them, slow and measured, and when Barry gasps, dips the very tip inside. Just enough to wet it. And then he says, blue eyes heavy with intent, “For you, of course. Don’t you know by now, Barry?”

Barry’s half-caught in memory, his body tingling wherever Thawne touches. It remembers this. Remembers him. It misses him. Distracted, Barry whispers, “Know what?”

Thawne smiles, and Barry leans closer, dazzled despite himself. “You can’t escape me, Barry. I’m always just one step ahead.”

Barry tries to protest. He thinks about protesting. Because Thawne isn’t one step ahead. Not anymore. He’s dead, or well, not dead, but trapped here, between worlds. Barry opens his mouth, an argument on the tip of his tongue, and Thawne closes the distance between them.

It’s the same.

Thawne’s lips are just as chapped as they were the last time that Barry had kissed him. Back then, Barry had teased him for it, and Thawne — Wells, at the time, of course — had said that he’d stop by the drugstore the next time he was out. Buy some chapstick. And then he’d pulled Barry into his lap and kissed him quiet.

The kiss is _almost_ the same.

Soft to start out, a possessive hand creeping up and into Barry's hair, and then harder. More passion. More want. Wet and slick and—

“No.” Barry jerks back.

Thawne, obligingly, stops kissing him. Though, Barry’s annoyed to realize, he makes no move to step away. “No?”

Barry bites down on his lower lip and concentrates on all the reasons why this is an awful idea. There are many.

He nods jerkily. “No.”

Thawne breathes in through his nose, taking a measured step backwards. He sounds amused. “All right, then.”

Barry nods again, his eyes intent on the enormous tree in the distance. The eternal sunset. The gleaming water beneath their feet. Anything but Thawne. He watches a squirrel the size of an elephant scurry down the tree’s trunk, and keeps not looking at Thawne.

“I’m assuming you have a plan,” Barry asks after a long moment.

Thawne shrugs, and when Barry glances at him, he’s giving him that look again. The gentle one, warm, almost loving. Barry’s quick to look away again. “I might.”

.

The tops of the skyscrapers are, absurdly, completely void of wind. Barry kicks his feet over the edge, watching the bottom half of the structure sway beneath him, and wonders if there’s anything scientific about this world at all. What is it, if it’s just a crack between time? How does it have structure? Or does it look this way because that’s how his mind perceives it? How Thawne’s mind has seen it, for all this time. And if it’s outside of time, how long has it been for him? Minutes? Centuries? How long has Barry even been here?

“You said that I won.”

Thawne’s voice startles Barry out of his thoughts, and he jumps, reeling for a moment before Thawne’s hand comes to rest on his knee, steadying him. Barry frowns, brow wrinkling, and for a moment he can’t figure out—

Oh.

“I did say that.”

Thawne smirks at him thinly, eyes slanted knowingly. His hand squeezes Barry’s knee once, before he moves it away. “You lied.”

Barry smiles softly, and is surprised by how little bitterness that’s left inside of him. He may not know what to make of their relationship, not now, with Thawne so warm and so close, but what he’d whispered to the other Wells — the memory of Thawne — still holds true. Barry forgives him. He _has_ to forgive him.

When he speaks, it’s with honesty. “I learned from the best.”

Something will come of this.

Barry will help Thawne—

No.

They’ll help _each other_ escape this impossible world.

They’ll emerge in Barry’s future, Thawne’s past, or somewhere in between. Barry will say those words that he can’t bring himself to say just now, the words sticking to the back of his tongue, choking up his larynx. He’ll let Thawne kiss him again, and this time, he knows that he won’t have the willpower to stop him. Won’t _want_ to stop him. He’ll allow it, and love it, and when it’s over, he will miss it.

Because Thawne’s right.

The universe was right when it stuck Thawne in this place of endless between. Because come what may, good or bad, ugly or glorious, there is no Barry Allen if there’s no Eobard Thawne. Thawne made him. He meticulously twisted and crafted their universe to his liking, inserted himself so solidly that the timeline would shatter into a million pieces if he was removed from the equation.

Turns out, Barry wasn’t lying at all. Thawne _did_ win. He just didn’t know it at the time.

With a huff, Barry pushes to his feet and turns to Thawne, offering him his hand. It isn’t a sign or some kind of metaphor, and it isn’t really a peace offering, but it easily _could_ be. If that’s what they both wanted.

Thawne glances at it briefly, and without the slightest hesitation, takes it. The bare skin of their palms brush and Barry knows he isn’t imagining the electricity that jolts between them as he tugs Thawne to his feet.

Thawne doesn’t remark on it, but he doesn’t let go either. He keeps them linked, grip firm as he stares out at the horizon; waiting. His face is animated — bright and excited, almost boyish in his enthusiasm — ready to take the next step into something new.

“Get ready,” he tells Barry, eyes sparking red.

Barry watches him; the way he takes his breaths too fast, how his lips part, tongue darting out to wet them. How he bounces in place, his entire body shivering all over as if he can already feel the Speed Force crackling around him. Barry thinks about kissing those red, wet lips. Distracting him so thoroughly that they miss their moment and have to stay here, an entire world where all they have is each other.

Barry takes a deep breath. Flips his cowl up. Breathe. In, out.

The horizon pulses—

And they go.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on tumblr! My [writing blog](http://callunawrites.tumblr.com/) and [my primary one](http://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/).


End file.
